by Larry Brown
They sat there for a little bit. Bobby really didn’t have any reason for coming by. He was just in the habit of checking on things. Elvis went back to watching his show and Bobby sat there thinking about Jewel. Wondering what this night would bring her. He was so deep into his thoughts that when Elvis spoke again it didn’t register for a moment. He raised his head. “What?”
“I said that was bad about Frankie Barlow, wasn’t it?”
He suddenly felt like he had been asleep for a while and the mention of that name was something that had lain buried, something he should have been keeping an eye on.
“What about Frankie Barlow?”
“You ain’t heard?”
“Naw, I ain’t heard. What?”
“Well I just figured you knew. It’s been on the scanner all day might near. Hell. Somebody killed him last night. Killed that nigger that worked for him too.”
All the things he’d worried about and now they were here. All this time just waiting for him to get out and for it to start all over again. He put both feet flat on the floor and set the coffee cup down. Elvis was staring at him. “Damn, boy, you white as a sheet.”
“Did they call over here?”
“Naw. I just figured you knew it. My nephew come by the house and told me. I got that scanner in the bedroom and I turned it up. Hell, Bobby, it ain’t in our county and I just figured …”
“How’d your nephew know about it?”
“He was coming back from fishing, stopped by there to get some beer, said the place was crawlin with cops and somebody told him Barlow got his head blowed off.”
He wasn’t even seeing the jail anymore. He was seeing the inside of that beer joint that he himself had been in many times years ago. The tall stools and the little baby monkey that clambered over the place like a squirrel and swung from rafter to rafter like a trapeze artist, how Barlow fed it peanuts one at a time and the patrons gave it beer.
“What’s the matter?” Elvis said. He reached over and turned the TV down. Bobby got the logbook and flipped it open. Harold had gone home and Jake had started his vacation at four o’clock. That left Cecil on call and Jerry on the road somewhere patrolling.
“Nothing. I was just wondering about something.” He closed the logbook and put it back on the desk. “You know if they picked up anybody?”
“Yeah.”
“Who?”
“Some nigger.”
It wasn’t quite dark when he drove his cruiser into the parking lot of the jail in Pine Springs and pulled in among the black-and-tan patrol cars gathered there. He’d called ahead to tell them he was coming but he didn’t see the sheriff’s new brown Galaxie parked near the front door. He shut off the car and got out. A few bats were fluttering over the parking lot.
There was a short concrete landing outside the door and he went up the steps to it. He reached for the doorknob but the door opened and swung out before he could turn it. A surprised deputy who narrowed his eyes at first and then looked at Bobby’s badge and did a quick recovery. “Evening, Sheriff, how you doing?”
“Fine. You?”
The deputy nodded and went on down the steps. Bobby went inside. There was nobody in the dayroom, but a television was playing.
“Hey Vinnie.”
Nobody answered him but he could hear people talking somewhere. There were WANTED posters from the FBI hanging on a bulletin board. Somebody was laughing down the hall. He walked back there. A deputy was leaning over a partition talking to the dispatcher. The deputy was grinning and telling her some things in a low voice and he didn’t look around immediately. The dispatcher looked at Bobby and nodded. She finally pointed to him and the deputy turned his head, then straightened up and nodded affably.
“Yessir. Can I help you?”
“I’m here to see Vinnie. He in?”
The deputy looked at the dispatcher. “You know if he’s in?”
She was a pretty young black woman with a gold tooth and she looked a little flustered.
“I’m not sure,” she said to Bobby. “His office is back there. Right down the hall. Just go on back.”
“Thank you ma’am.”
He stepped around the deputy, who had already turned his attention back to the woman. Bobby glanced at her as he went by and she smiled. He nodded. The office was at the end of the hall and there was a pane of rippled glass in the top half of the door. He rapped on it.
“Hey Vinnie.”
Somebody inside said for him to come on in and he opened the door. Two deputies were leaning over a table looking at some papers. One of them was named Jones and Bobby had talked to him at a roadblock one night.
“Hey Sheriff,” he said, and came over with his hand out. They shook. “How’s the world treating you?”
“About the same, I guess. I was looking for Vinnie.”
“Yessir. He’s stepped out for a minute. Come on and have a seat. This is Jimmy Douglas here.”
Bobby nodded to him but kept standing. They seemed to be waiting for something, but his business wasn’t with them.
“Can we get you something, cup of coffee maybe?”
“That’d be fine, thanks.”
“How about getting him some coffee, Jimmy?”
“Sure.”
The other man went out the door and closed it behind him. Bobby took the chair that was offered and sat down. He saw an ashtray on Vinnie’s desk and he lit up and crossed his legs, took off his hat. Jones leaned back against the table and pulled a piece of lint off his pants.
“Well we had a busy day,” he said.
“That right?”
“Yeah, if it ain’t drunks it’s car wrecks and thieves. Somebody beating the shit out of his old lady. Is Hughie still out there talking to Juliet?”
“You mean the dispatcher?”
“Yessir. I wish she’d go on and give him some so he’d stop talking about it. Vinnie’s done told him he’s going to fire his ass if he don’t stop talking to her on the radio. And when he ain’t around her it’s nigger this and nigger that. Beats anything I ever seen.”
“She’s a pretty woman,” Bobby said.
“Yessir she is. Vinnie said you wanted to talk to him about that thing today.”
Bobby shifted in the chair. The deputy wasn’t smiling anymore.
“He did?”
“Yessir.”
Bobby leaned over holding his hat and slid the ashtray closer.
“I’m chief deputy now,” Jones said. “I can tell you what happened. Or what we found.”
“Did you go out there today?”
“I was the first one there. Last one to leave. We ain’t got the pictures developed yet but it was one hell of a mess.”
“What time was that?”
“This morning about ten o’clock.”
The other deputy came back in with the coffee and set it on the desk close to the ashtray. Bobby thanked him and he went back out. It was hot in the office and papers lay on the dirty floor. Bobby took a sip of the coffee and nearly scalded his tongue. He set it down.
“I heard y’all picked up somebody.”
The deputy shook his head and looked at a picture of Lyndon Johnson on the wall.
“We done turned him loose. He didn’t have nothin to do with it. He was just over there lookin for his brother-in-law. He found him, too. With his whole head blowed off. He didn’t have no gun, nothin. And they was both dead a long time before he got there. Coroner said that himself.”
Bobby picked up the coffee and tried another sip. It tasted like it was about three days old. They hadn’t put any sugar in it, either.
“You know what time it happened?”
“Around midnight maybe. Maybe a little later. It looked like somebody shot Barlow through the window and then shot him a few more times.”
“What with?”
“Shotgun. A twelve. We picked up four shells.”
Bobby stared at the wall and smoked his cigarette. He could imagine how it looked and what that much
lead would have done to a man.
“Did they take anything?”
“Cleaned out the register except for the change. But Barlow had about eighteen hundred dollars in his billfold. I don’t guess they thought to check for that.”
“And what about the other guy?”
“That was Rufus Tallie. He worked for him, had for years. I figure he was killed later. His house was close to there. Probably heard all the racket and came in at the wrong time. I went over and talked to his wife. It was real bad. They got about five kids.”
Bobby leaned back in the chair and puffed on his cigarette, then bent forward and stubbed it out.
“So,” he said. “You don’t think it was a robbery.”
“It’s hard to say. I imagine he’s made a lot of enemies over the years. You can’t deal with a bunch of drunks seven days a week and not have trouble.”
“Ain’t that the damn truth,” Bobby said.
“Could be somebody just had something against him and went over there and settled it. I doubt we’ll ever know who did it. We ain’t got a thing to go on. We ain’t got a single witness. Less somebody ups and confesses that’s probably the end of it.”
He was probably right. It was all a question of whether you could live with something like that and be able to keep your mouth shut about it. Byers could have probably gotten away with killing his daddy. But he sobered up and he couldn’t live with it. And if Glen had done this, could he? As bad as Bobby hated to think it, he probably could.
“Do you think there’s a lot of people who’d like to see Barlow dead?”
The deputy considered this for a moment.
“He never done nothing to me,” he said finally. “But there was always a lot of trouble out there.”
Bobby set the coffee down and stood up and put his hat on. “Well. I appreciate you talking to me.”
“I’m sorry Vinnie ain’t here. You could wait on him if you want to.”
“I better get on back. I got to go to a funeral tomorrow and I got to get some sleep.”
The deputy came away from the desk and shook hands with Bobby once more. Bobby stood there for a second and then he looked into the deputy’s eyes.
“Is he drunk again?”
The deputy was hurt by the question, but he turned his head away and nodded at the floor.
“It’s got to where it’s every weekend’s business. I don’t know how much longer I can cover for him. He give me a job seven years ago. I’m grateful to him for that. But I reckon he just don’t care no more.” He looked up at Bobby. “You think you’ll ever get like that? Where you just don’t care no more?”
“Ask me in twenty years,” Bobby said, and he straightened his hat as he started out. But then he thought of something and he stopped. “What about the monkey?”
“Shit. They got him, too.”
Tommy Babb had gone on down the road in his shiny red car a few hours before, but Virgil was still sitting on a bar stool under the winking blue lights of the VFW. There was a long uneven bar top that had been sawn out of the center of a tree and its glossy surface was marred from the burns of a thousand cigarettes and thousands of nights. Not many faces resided there in the back mirror, just his and Woodrow’s and that of a weathered whore named Gloria who was about sixty. The bartender was watching Ed Sullivan on the television and he’d already rung the bell for last call. Sunday nights he closed early unless it was a holiday or somebody’s birthday or some other special event. Anything would do, but there was nothing special going on tonight. Virgil had a six-pack in a sack on the stool beside him for the ride home and after.
“Y’all drank up, now,” the bartender said.
Woodrow raised his bottle and drank from it. Gloria was trying to weave her bottle into his to make some kind of a toast. Virgil was glad Woodrow was sitting between them since he’d seen her give somebody a blow job on one of the pool tables one night and figured she was probably diseased.
“I’ll be ready in a minute, Virgil,” Woodrow said.
“I ain’t in no hurry.”
The boy had come in for a while with him, where he was welcomed by the drunk and the sober alike, bought beers, told tales of war, and given advice. Don’t pat em on the head. Don’t fuck em if they cough cause they got TB. That old thing about it being sideways is just a bunch of bullshit. Virgil had talked fishing with him in those few hours and he hoped him well in his distant war.
“Y’all come on, now, I got to go home and eat supper,” said the bartender.
“Me too,” Virgil said. It was probably going to be something out of a can. That was about all he had, beef stew or soup. He guessed he could make some tuna fish. All evening he’d thought about that fried chicken and the one who’d fried it. He’d had some vague hope earlier that maybe the afternoon would somehow take him by there, but that had died now. It had been a long time since he’d seen her. He’d held himself back and today at the store there had been those questions in her eyes. He guessed it had been close to a year. And there had been no way for her to see him as long as he stayed at home since she wouldn’t come by there. The few times she’d called him he was still feeling guilty over Emma. Maybe she’d gotten to hurting so bad she couldn’t stand it.
Woodrow lifted his bottle again and emptied it, set it down. He picked up a fresh one already opened.
“All right, come on, let’s let Fred go home,” he said.
They got off their stools and said their good-byes. Woodrow had to take Gloria’s arm to steady her because her hipbones weren’t good and she was weary with drink. Virgil followed them out the door, his sack tucked up under his arm, watching his step out in the dark gravel lot, making his way behind them over to the car. He got in the backseat with the dog, who was sitting there looking around.
“Old Nimrod ain’t took a shit back there has he?” Woodrow was poking his head in the window at him.
“I can’t smell it if he has.”
“Good. If he tries to bite you or anything, just knock the shit out of him.”
Woodrow went around and got Gloria into the front seat. She turned around, smiled at Virgil with her hag’s smile.
“I’ll suck you off for two bucks, Virgil.”
“I’ll pass.”
“Woodrow won’t get it in good till he’ll shoot off. Grown man like him.”
“Well I guess you just look so good Gloria he can’t control himself.”
“I guess so.”
She seemed happily satisfied with that and turned back around. Woodrow came over to Virgil’s side and got in behind the wheel. He turned that last beer up and then stuck it between his legs. Then he reached forward and cranked the car and they pulled out. He turned the lights on and Virgil looked at the dog next to him. An immeasurably sad hound with his long drooping face and ears that hung way down. He looked big enough to bite your hand off.
“You still gonna sell this dog, Woodrow?”
“Hell yes. I’m gonna take him to Ripley first thing in the mornin. Trade him for a crate of chickens or maybe a goat. Trade him for a good goat and he’d keep my pasture cleaned up.”
Virgil borrowed the opener from the dash and took the top off one of the beers and then passed it back. He took a good sip and settled back in the seat. The headlights carved a tunnel of light through the black woods that surrounded them, high sage grass in the ditches on either side and the road twisting through hills and curves where sometimes deer stood stark and gray with their big ears and electric eyes. Sometimes they froze where they were and sometimes they put their tails up and leaped fluidly away, bounding over downed logs and brush piles with their tails waving like banners.
Gloria had moved closer to Woodrow and she was saying something to him in a low voice. Woodrow was nodding and listening and Virgil wondered what she was telling him. What she was going to do to him maybe. Probably nothing that mattered. Just drunk talk. He’d said plenty of it himself more times than he cared to remember.
He sipped his beer a
nd looked at the dog. The hound had curled up on the seat with his head hanging over the edge, jostling slowly inside his skin as the old car bumped and rocked over the road. Woodrow drove slowly and the radio played country tunes at a low level, songs by an angel of the earth whose soul had been freed on the side of a mountain.
He got one of the last Camels from his pocket and lit it, resting his elbow on the armrest and leaning against the door as they began to be bathed softly in a pulsing red light that seemed to have drifted upon them from out of the sky.
“Damn,” Woodrow said. “The law’s got us.”
Virgil turned around and looked at the car tailing them and the dust rising against the headlights so that they were steadily emerging from a cloud of tiny particles that threatened to cover them, put them out.
“Hell, I guess I better pull over.”
Woodrow came to a stop in the middle of the road and left the motor running. Virgil turned back around to face the front and watched Woodrow looking into the rearview mirror.
“He’s comin up here,” Woodrow said. “Stick this beer in between us, Gloria.”
She took it and did something with it, maybe secreted it away somewhere in the folds of her dress. Woodrow had his window down and Virgil heard a car door slam behind them.
“It’s Bobby.”
Virgil turned his head and looked at him as he came up beside the car. He had his gun on and he looked in at Virgil first, then at Woodrow and Gloria.
“Hey Bobby,” Woodrow said.
“Hey Woodrow. What are y’all up to?”
“Aw, we just been down to the VFW for a little bit. We was takin Virgil home.”
“That right?”
“Yeah.”
Virgil didn’t say anything but he wondered why he’d stopped them. The car was still running and Gloria was looking straight ahead. Bobby just stood there for a second like he was trying to think of what to say. Then he bent over and put his hands on his knees.
“I need to talk to Virgil,” he said. “I thought I might run into y’all down here somewhere.”
He moved down to the window where Virgil was sitting and leaned over to him. “You mind getting in with me for a little bit? I’ll take you on home after while.”